My last session featured a good bit of play involving the Art of Investigation and I really loved it. I had put a dead body on the roadside and let the players go at it. I could tell them it was a dead body, shot with arrows, and that they could learn more about it by using a relevant skill and the Scholar approaches.
Tactics let them find out the body was shot from behind, culture let them know it was a crane clan member, smithing let them realize the arrows had a custom design on it, commerce yielded no information. If they had done a government check they could have found out the character's position, but I gave each player 1 check before I was going to direct them on and had a list of things they could learn based on the skills they used.
I called for a passive air + smithing and earth + smithing from a character who has a passion for armaments later to connect the arrow they had seen in that corpse to the arrows they saw being used by another character.
All in all I would say this was pretty easy for the players to understand, and I think they liked that each of them could learn something based on their characters skills. I've run detective stories with this same group and I think they liked that ALL of them could contribute.
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We had a duel again. Last session we did one to try it out, this time we were doing it for real as part of the story. Duels... need to be much much faster. I think being long doesn't make a duel more engaging, rather it makes it feel more repetitive.
We tried provokes, but mostly spammed center stance trying to get the opponent to go over their strife, when a player did finally go over their strife the attack role of the other character simply missed... it wasn't bad but it felt like it just drug on... there were like 4 strike actions and they all missed trying to do that iaijutsu rising cut... idk it just felt like too much time was spent doing nothing.
I hope the change to dueling makes it a single thing, where you get an assessment, bid, then you set your stance which serves as a sort of rock / paper / scissors sort of advantage augmented by your stats, and then a strike which would resolve the duel one way or the other, with ties going to who had the higher initiative.
In this way a duel can happen, and we get a sense of finality.
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I think the Skills should be called something else - because they aren't really skills anymore. I think calling them Fields is more appropriate as it queues players into the fact that they aren't the narrow skills like other games, that these are simply fields of knowledge and expertise that a character has. Anything a player wants to do that is illegal falls under skulduggery, anything religious goes under theology, anything in talking to people is under courtesy.
Also - smithing is a bad name, I think it should be "armaments." This way we don't think it is all hammers and anvils, but includes all weapons and armors in general.
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The Stances are a bit dry - I spiced these up by having Demeanor effect TN based on stance. There was a stance that would give the player a TN 3 or a TN 1 to hit based on reading the opponent. idk if that is the best solution but combat needs something a bit more and having the stances interact with each other with a +/- 1 tn sounded good.
The problem is that in spite of the stances it doesn't feel like you're actually doing anything different based on your combat approach. All of them are basically an attack...
Another idea was to change it so that Earth and Air were full defense, Water and Void were neutral, and Fire was full attack. If you selected Earth or Air you wouldn't naturally get an attack, but would get a counter attack based on conditions. If you are in earth stance and are hit, whether you take damage or not, then you get to attack back at that character. Similarly in air stance if you are attacked but it doesn't hit you get a counter attack. Water is the neutral stance, you attack and defend like normal. Fire is the full attack, giving its damage boost as normal. Void could be a neutral stance like water, or we can go with the sacrifice theme and say taking the Void stance makes you a TN 1 to be hit, but if someone hits you, you get a free hit against them dealt simultaneously with the damage dealt to you.
just my thoughts...
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In this session we had a lot more fun and I think we'll be sticking with the beta. I was on the fence about that, but with dedication and a focus on blending the mechanics and narrative I think we're getting it.
Edited by shosuko